Yao Xie is a Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, which she joined in 2013 as an Assistant Professor. She also serves as Associate Director of Machine Learning and Data Science of the Center for Machine Learning. From September 2017 until March 2023 she was the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor. She was a Research Scientist at Duke University from 2012 to 2013. 

Her research lies at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and optimization in providing theoretical guarantees and developing computationally efficient and statistically powerful methods for problems motivated by real-world applications. 

She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Journal of the American Statistical Association: Theory and Methods, Sequential Analysis: Design Methods and Applications, INFORMS Journal on Data Science, and an Area Chair of NeurIPS and ICML.